Obama & His Donors

On Thursday, the Romney campaign announced that it had raised over $100 million in June, between the campaign, the Romney PAC, and the Republican National Committee. On Monday came news that the President, for the second month in a row, has been outraised by Romney quite handily — and Romney’s campaign had over 500,000 donors to boot.

This all comes less than two weeks after President Obama was busted making a call to donors from Air Force One. The President, who “uses a non-taxpayer-funded phone for political calls from the plane,” made the claim that Romney, the GOP, and GOP-allied organizations could easily outspend his campaign. He also compared his campaign to the failed union recall of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, saying “We just can’t be outspent 10 to 1…That’s what happened in Wisconsin recently. The Koch brothers and their allies spent more than the other side’s entire campaign, our side’s entire campaign.”

Ignoring the inaccuracy regarding the alleged disparity between union allies in Wisconsin and Walker’s allies — spelled out by Heritage’s James Sherk here — the President’s concern about being outspent and its impact on the election is rather laughable, even in light of Romney’s fundraising:

1. He has substantially more money on hand than Romney, and has strong union backing.
2. He has spent more money than Romney, though to be fair he was outraised in May and June, and the Supreme Court’s decision on the PPACA raised millions for Romney at the end of June.
3. He is probably simply pulling a Boehner, making things sound worse than they are in order to spark aggressive thinking among his base of donors.
4. Unions and other Democratic Party supporters hold most of the Top Twenty donor spots in an Open Secrets tracking of donations from 1988 through 2012. Clearly, the liberal base is not suffering when it comes to helping candidates.
5. As even this biased post-recall Washington Post article notes, most Wisconsin voters had made their minds up before the major ad push leading up to the recall, and many voted against the unions simply because they were angry with the process. After all, recalls are supposed to be because someone violated the public trust in an egregious fashion — not because a policy someone disagrees with becomes law.
6. The President has made more than 50% more campaign stops than Bush did in his entire re-election campaign, and approximately 73% as many as both Presidents Bush and President Clinton combined held in their re-election campaigns. And the general election campaign season has only just kicked off. With so many trips to come, does he really think he’s going to be outspent? I doubt it.
7. Finally, via the LA Times last November, a reminder that the President broke his 2008 campaign vow to use public campaign dollars, and sort of set the stage for the 2012 campaign’s style of fundraising:

But Obama is also partially to blame for this new world order. Like he did in 2008, Obama will forgo the presidential matching funds program, and the limits that come with it.

In 2008, Obama became the first major-party candidate to pass on participating in the Watergate-era program for the general election. Doing so gave him a huge advantage over his GOP opponent, John McCain, who took the matching funds. Obama raised $745 million in 2008, compared with McCain’s $368 million.

So, yes, as we move forward towards November the left is going to keep claiming Obama is the poor man’s candidate. And I can’t blame them. After all, how can a small donor like George Soros or the CEO of Dreamworks, or a middle-class guy like top Obama campaign bundler Jon Corzine, compete with Karl Rove and the Koch brothers? Oh, wait…